The Wheels on The Car Go Round and Round...*

On Wednesday afternoon, Sharon was getting ready for a solo trip with Hallie to the pediatrician for her 4 month (adjusted) checkup. The appointment was for 4:30pm, and things were going swimmingly well schedule wise. Hallie was washed, changed, dressed, fed, and was down for a nap. It was all of 1:30pm. Sharon felt really good about things.

When that happens, you know that a shoe is about to drop.

In this case, it was a wheel.

Our car was parked around the corner because the last time it was used, Sharon came home from work around 8pm, and it's pretty much impossible to find a spot on our block at that hour. The idea of carrying Hallie in her car seat and a portable oxygen tank around the corner on icy sidewalks when the wind chill was -5 was not an appealing one, so Sharon thought: Hey, the kid is asleep, the neighbor is on call, and it'll only take a minute, so I'll run around the block, move the car in front of the house (where there was a nice big spot) and be really prepared to get her to the doctor on time.

So, out she went to get the car. Now, for the past three weeks a subcontractor for our local gouging and utterly corrupt gas company has been ripping up the streets replacing the gas mains. These are not tidy workers. Far from it. Nor do they seem to have much of a regular schedule. They ask us to move our cars (and threaten to tow them) one day, but don't show up. They don't ask us to move our cars and do tow them on another day. They lopped limbs off of at least two trees (including ours) on the block and there is rubble everywhere.

Apparently, they are also unable to place the metal plates over the ditches they dig in a way that is correct and, oh, prevent cars from falling in them.

So Sharon drives around the block and gets to our corner. There is one of those white and orange saw horses there, so she maneuvers around it, and heads over the metal plate that is ostensibly covering the ditch.

And then she falls in the ditch, because the plate came lose. There she is, baby in house, doctor's appointment to make, stuck in a ditch with three wheels in the air and one on the ground, approximately 12 feet down from surface level.

Sharon does what any panic-stricken person would do: she tries to call me. Now, at that very moment, I'm about 80 miles away in Lancaster, where I work, meeting with students. When I don't answer the phone after three calls, she contemplates her future.

Fortunately, at that very moment, the ditch-digging contractors who were enjoying a coffee and warm up break in their truck looked up and saw our car in the ditch. They came out and six of them managed to push the car out and free it. Thankfully we have four wheel drive. Otherwise, we'd have definitely needed a fire truck or a mule or something.

Anyway, the car is fine, Sharon is fine, and the baby slept through the whole event.

Sharon got back into the house, the baby woke up, had another bottle, decided to 'hulk' (our term for poop, since that's what she looks and sounds like) during the bottle, got poop up and down her back and her onesie, and needed to be changed before the doctor's visit. Needless to say, in the end, Sharon and Hallie ended up being late for the appointment.

But...her checkup was great! She now weighs 12 lbs. 9.2 ounces (every .2 counts around here!) and is in the 25th percentile for weight for her adjusted age and about 10th percentile for length and head circumference. Her pediatrician is very pleased. In fact, he didn't even recognize her when he passed her in the hall during the weight check. While Hallie was being weighed by the nurse, he needed to ask the nurse something, and she responded "I'll take care of it as soon as I'm done weighing Hallie." His response: "Hallie, that's not Hallie, that baby is too big to be Hallie!" We were happy to hear that.

Anyway, the baby really is beginning to look like a little kid. I'll leave you with this image of her after we got home from the doctor (I met Sharon and the baby there after work):



*Disclaimer: I was not on the scene for the following event, nor was I (apparently) able to answer my cell phone when it was happening. Finally, this is not a picture of our car, but one that I found somewhere on the internet. Our car was not rescued by a firetruck (though admittedly that would have added a certain amount of drama to the situation) but by the doofy guys who dug the ditch to begin with. In the panic of the moment, Sharon did not have the foresight to think about this event as a bloggable one, so we had to go with a generic representation of the incident.